Innovating on a Legacy Platform

Innovation tends to evoke new products, interactions, or interfaces. What usually does not come to mind are monolithic, existing infrastructures that are already in use. At Vox Media, that existing infrastructure, some of our oldest technology, is our content management system, called Chorus.

Chorus is an incredible tool, but it’s also a heavy, workhorse CMS where innovation is difficult. This talk walks through how our teams still found opportunities to experiment and make bets while working within the confines of our legacy CMS.

Designing for a New Interface

While on Vox Media’s innovation team, I designed a voice bot without having worked with voice before. This talk shares the three things I took away from that experience that will help you the next time you’re faced with designing—or conceiving or developing—a new interface.

A few years ago, I led design on Vox Media’s first-ever innovation team called Alpha. Alpha was short-lived and eventually sunsetted, but it made an impression that long outlasted its actual run time at the company. Even now, we still talk about Alpha on the product team—in fairness, we mostly talk about what we’d do differently, but we also recognize Alpha’s strengths and what we can take away and apply to our product teams moving forward.

This final talk details my takeaways from my time on Alpha. I hope these tips will help you if you are considering pursuing more experimental projects or even spinning up an innovation team.

A few weeks ago, my design director asked if I’d mind making a quick six-screen prototype that we could test with users. The mocks were done, and all I needed to do was string them together into a prototype that we could load into our testing suite.

I flipped through my mental rolodex of prototyping tools. Sure, I said. I estimated a few hours, tops. Those few hours soon stretched into a week.

Last week, I attended Interaction 17, Interaction Design Association’s annual conference. Alongside more than 1,000 other designers and makers, I listened to dozens of presentations about applying design to real world problems. I heard folks detail the challenges of expanding internet access in far-flung regions of Africa, designing interactions for automated cars, and staying mindful while still engaging with wearable technology products

I’m thrilled to say that I will be speaking at the Society for News Design’s conference in a few months. I’ll discuss how I approached adapting the design process for a voice-based interface, inspired by this case study I wrote last year for Vox Media's product blog. SND interviewed me for their website, and I figured I’d repost it here. Enjoy!

With a new year comes new projects, and so I retired one of my very first portfolio case studies, a side-scrolling mobile game app called Hootie Puff. I decided to recap some of the learnings here. The game is still live on Google Play and iTunes, so feel free to go straight to playing!

We got a phone call on the evening of June 20 letting us know that Ezra Klein had landed a 40-minute interview with Hillary Clinton. We took a deep breath and set a publish date two and a half weeks later. This article is a peek at what went into this editorial/product collaboration and what we learned.

As journalists, advertisers, producers, and creators, content is at our core at Vox Media. And we want to ensure that everyone—regardless of ability, situation, or context—can access it. Last week, six of our team members gathered in Washington, D.C., for two days to try and achieve just that.

I have conducted thousands of interviews in my career so far, first as a reporter and now as a product designer, and am convinced that interviewing is deceptively complex. The results can be incredibly insightful, but a poorly planned and executed interview is at best, time poorly spent, and at worst, misguided insights that may mislead your end product.

I am thrilled that my iOS outlining app for writers has been accepted onto the App Store! For those who need a refresher, Leder is a highlighting and outlining tool that helps writers organize and edit text on the go. I researched, designed, and developed Leder myself as part of my master's degree in creative digital media.

Onboarding is the process of introducing new users to a product. At its most basic level, onboarding should explain how your product works. But truly effective onboarding sends an even deeper message. It should let users know how your product will enhance their lives. Most users call it quits after only a few times trying a problematic app—onboarding may be your only chance to convince users that your product is worth their time and energy.